Portia Burton

Biography

Portia Burton is the founder of PLB Analytics, a company which uses data to solve practical business problems. She is also the organizer of the Portland Data Science Group, a ragtag club of data visualization and data mining nerds. Portia loves poking around with Pandas, Scikit-learn and building nifty one-off apps with Flask. When she is not in front of her computer she enjoys impromptu yoga in the park.

Sessions for this user

This presentation will give a brief overview of machine learning, the k-nearest neighbor algorithm and Scikit-learn. Sometimes developers need to make decisions, even when they don't have all of the required information. Machine learning attempts to solve this problem by using known data (a training data sample) to make predictions about the unknown. For example, usually a user doesn't tell Amazon explicitly what type of book they want to read, but based on the user's purchasing history, and the user's demographic, Amazon is able to induce what the user might like to read.